Start a Book Drive

Start a Book Drive

You really can start a library in Africa. Just follow this winning formula:

Help start a library in Africa by organizing your own book drive. Schools, Scouts, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, churches, college clubs, companies and many others have offered the gift of reading to an African community by recycling books from family bookshelves.

Read our Book Drive Guidelines to learn all you need to know to collect, sort, pack and then mail your books to our warehouse, where they will be containerized for shipment to Africa. Your goal is to collect 1,000 appropriate books and approximately $500 for shipping and related costs. Double this and you can start two! Triple it and... you get the idea. To get ideas from other book drives -- how they've collected their books and raised their funds -- take a look at active book drive pages.

We ship books all year round. Our typical calendar is:

Botswana in March

Ghana in April

Lesotho in May

Malawi in June

Sierra Leone in September

Swaziland and Kenya in December

To find the countries and types of books we need now, click on the I'm Ready to Register Now! button below. Scroll down to the Book Drive Preferences drop-down menu. Then please register to get started, or request more information if you have questions.

Please note: Only book drives in the U.S. or in Canadian cities near the border are able to make use of the U.S. Postal Service media mail options to get books to our warehouse in New Orleans. Book drives in other countries are not financially feasible.